Trump’s fortunes go from toss of a coin to dead cert within hours

As states fell like dominoes to the former president, it became clear that black, Latino and young voters were turning against Kamala Harris

This was meant to have been a US election that rested on a razor’s edge, a contest that was simply too close to predict.
By the time Fox News called the result at 6.50am UK time, it was clear that it had been anything but: Donald Trump, the bookies’ favourite, had trounced Kamala Harris in a result that was not so much a defeat for the Democrats as a humiliation.
Swing states fell to Trump like dominoes and Ms Harris did worse than Joe Biden’s 2020 results in all but two states.
Yet there had been nothing inevitable about Trump pulling off the greatest of political comebacks when he announced his bid to become president in November 2022. Only one man in history had been re-elected after losing the presidency, and Trump had at one time seemed more likely to spend his late 70s in prison than in the Oval Office.
Ms Harris had a golden opportunity to capitalise on Trump’s weaknesses, but swathes of black voters, Latin Americans, women, blue collar workers and the young all turned their backs on her, preferring instead the man who had been portrayed by so many as their enemy.
As an extraordinary election night unfolded, it became obvious that Trump’s opponents had once again woefully underestimated his ability to connect with a coalition of voters drawn from all parts of society.
The night had started so differently for Ms Harris and her supporters. Early exit polls from the first states to close their polling stations prompted talk of a Harris landslide, thanks to some wishful thinking about the motivation of voters.
Preliminary results from an NBC News exit poll suggested that the future of democracy was voters’ biggest concern, with 35 per cent of voters saying it was their top priority, ahead of the economy (31 per cent) abortion (18 per cent) and immigration (14 per cent).
Good news for Ms Harris, surely? By 10.50pm UK time, the Harris campaign team was boldly briefing political journalists that the Democrats were edging ahead, citing high Puerto Rican voter turnout in Philadelphia, and high enthusiasm among students in Pennsylvania.
They also claimed that rural Republican turnout in North Carolina – another swing state – was lower than expected.
But the anecdotal evidence on the ground was telling a different story. In Northampton County, Pennsylvania, polling station volunteer Nancy McKay-Rosa said she had “never seen such a big mix” of Republican voters.
What she was seeing with her own eyes was what the data would later confirm – that Trump had built a new coalition of supporters: young and old, black and white, men and women, or as she put it: “I see our party now becoming the big tent because we are now the party of the people.”
Democrats had their hands over their ears, but she was undeniably right.
It was shortly after midnight in the UK when the early warning signs started to materialise for Ms Harris. That high turnout of Puerto Ricans was benefiting Trump, not Ms Harris, as polling showed the vice president was underperforming in Puerto Rican areas in Florida.
In Osceola County, which Joe Biden won with 56.1 per cent of the vote in 2020, Ms Harris was barely managing to get over 50 per cent – still ahead of Trump, but only just. It was a pattern that would be repeated over and over again as the night wore on, with Ms Harris doing worse than Mr Biden’s 2020 result state by state and county by county.
After four years of soaring living costs and inflation, the state of the economy was proving to be the decisive concern for the average American – and most thought Trump was the more likely candidate to get prices down.
It meant Ms Harris failed to increase the Democrats’ vote share among women despite her strong stance on female health care and abortion access. Trump, meanwhile, recorded a two-point gain among women.
Perhaps the biggest story of the night in terms of voter demographics was the voting patterns among ethnic minority voters, particularly Latin Americans, known as Latinos.
By 12.30am the swing state of Georgia – the closest run result of any state at the last election – was going Trump’s way, with an increase in support among independent and Latino voters, and a few minutes later, exit polls in North Carolina, another swing state, told an almost identical story.
Trump was up with Latino voters by 7 points, including a 16-point rise among Latino women, and was up 5 points with black voters, who were clearly rejecting the first black woman to stand for president.
Remarkably, national data showed that Trump was up 13 points among Latino voters compared to his 2020 showing, despite a Trump-supporting comedian at his Madison Square Garden rally last month comparing Puerto Rico to a floating island of garbage.
By now panic was setting in among Harris supporters. Two other swing states – Arizona and Nevada – have 30 per cent Latino populations, suggesting they were about to back Trump.
Against all predictions, Trump was also up 8 points among voters aged 18-29.
There were also hints of Trump gains among affluent college-educated voters, supposedly Ms Harris’s people.
By 2.30am Trump’s vote share was up in 450 out of the 500 counties that had almost completed their counts (there are 3,100 counties in total). They included Baldwin County, Georgia, which almost invariably reflects the national result, and where Trump was on course for a 3.5 point swing.
Across counties where median household income was between $25,000 a year – roughly equivalent to the federal poverty line for a family of four – and $75,000, the US average, Trump’s vote share was above 70 per cent. The Democrats, once the party of the working class and the champions of the social safety net, had morphed into a party of the elite.
Even Joe Biden’s home town of Scranton, Pennsylvania, was turning its back on the Democrats. A 5.3 per cent swing towards Trump was driven by disaffected blue collar workers drifting towards the Republican candidate. While Mr Biden had been able to lean into his Rust Belt roots, Ms Harris, from California, had no such appeal to the white working class.
By 4.30am those early predictions of a Harris landslide were starting to look embarrassing as US networks formally predicted a Trump win in North Carolina, which was about to become the first swing state to declare its result. With 16 electoral college votes, the state is the joint second-biggest of the swing states, together with Georgia.
The Harris team put a brave face on it by saying that the swing states she was most likely to win – Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – were still in play, but the previously buoyant mood at Howard University in Washington DC, alma mater of Ms Harris, had turned to dejection.
On a big screen in the hall where Ms Harris would give her victory speech if she won, CNN’s legendary election night anchor John King told his audience that based on what was known so far, he would rather be Trump than Ms Harris.
CNN analyst Jake Tapper summed up the growing shock at Ms Harris’s failure. Shown data on counties where Ms Harris had increased the Democrats’ 2020 vote share by 3 per cent or more, he said. “Holy smokes. Literally nothing?!”
Campaigners who had been distributing American flags ready for Ms Harris’s big moment stopped waving their banners and put their hands in their pockets, shocked into silence. At Trump-supporting election parties, cries of “fight, fight, fight” greeted news that Georgia had been called for Trump.
As 6am approached, Harris supporters were starting to sound desperate, maybe even deluded.
Cedric Richmond, her campaign co-chairman, addressed the crowd at Howard University and told supporters that Ms Harris would not be addressing supporters.
“We still have votes to count. We still have states that have not been called yet,” Mr Richmond said. “We will continue, overnight, to fight to make sure that every vote is counted, that every voice has spoken. So you won’t hear from the vice-president tonight, but you will hear from her tomorrow.”
One Democrat campaigner in the hall said: “It’s just like Hillary all over again.”
In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s team announced she would not be addressing supporters at the Javits Convention Center, where crowds had gathered to witness what they thought would be a comfortable win over Donald Trump. She went on to lose.
Harris supporters were told to go home. In Florida, Trump was putting the finishing touches to his victory speech.
It was a few minutes before 6.30am in the UK when it became clear that Ms Harris’s challenge was over.
Pennsylvania, the biggest of the swing states with 19 electoral college votes, is said to be the state that picks the president. No Democrat has won the White House without it since 1948 and Ms Harris’s hopes had hinged on high turnout in the Keystone State’s urban areas.
But turnout was poor in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and Fox News called Pennsylvania for Trump, prompting wild celebrations among Republican supporters who began chanting “USA! USA!”
Trump had secured 50.7 per cent of the vote in the state to Ms Harris’s 48.2 per cent, and she performed notably badly in the state’s two bellwether counties of Erie and Northampton. Biden had won them in 2020, but Trump took them back in 2024.
For all the early talk of a surge towards Ms Harris, the pollsters had got it wrong. Women had not turned out for her in the numbers the Democrats were counting on. Black and Latino voters flocked to Trump. Blue collar workers flipped to red. Young people lurched to the right.
After Pennsylvania was called, Jim Messina, Barack Obama’s former campaign manager, was brutal in his assessment of the Harris campaign.
He told MSNBC: “Going forward, the Democrats have a real rural problem, and they have real communication challenges to a whole bunch of groups, including young voters and Latinos, that we thought we had a better message to and just didn’t at all.”
He added: “I hope we don’t all rush. I hope we all take some time to look at all these things, do a comprehensive report and talk about how to move forward, because we got our butts kicked tonight.”
Ms Harris improved on Mr Biden’s 2020 result in just two states, Maine and Washington, as she dramatically underperformed the outgoing president. Trump improved his own vote share in 41 states compared with his 2020 results.
Ironically, his biggest increases were in Democratic states that ultimately went to Ms Harris, including Illinois, where his vote share increased from 40 to 47 per cent, and New York, where he also recorded a seven point gain, to 44 per cent. In most states he increased his vote share by more than one percentage point.
At the county level, the picture was even more stark. Ms Harris managed to increase her vote share by three percentage points or more in just 24 of the 3,100 counties in the US.
By 6.50am Fox News had called the overall result: Trump had won and the 45th president of the United States would also be the 47th.
Ms Harris went into hiding. As the rest of the world digested the news of Trump’s victory, she said nothing at all for nearly 12 hours, leading to accusations that she was a sore loser.
Trump, meanwhile, made a characteristically bombastic and unscripted victory speech.
“It’s a political victory that our country has never seen before, nothing like this,” he said. “Frankly this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time.”